Is Soundcloud actually helping you reach your goals as a musician?

I think Soundcloud is a necessary evil - it has really innovated in so many areas, and pushed online music streaming and fan interaction into new territory. But despite it's 5 Billion+ streams a month, it has NOT figured out a way to monetize this traffic. It also hasn't expanded on it's feature set - i.e. still no decent way to promote events. And it has made virtually no effort - and is in fact antagonistic - to other platforms like Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, etc. It's API is also essentially useless to developers, because they haven't extended Soundcloud's allowable features internally.

So basically, they have an amazing foundation platform, with a shit load of traffic, a (once upon a time) innovative embeddable player (and customizable API) but don't have the money or initiative to take it any further.

This makes it kind of a brick wall. What do you do with it? You can give away all your music. Create a fan base of listeners. Have people (kind of) chat on top of your songs. You can take this platform and post is all over the net, on websites, social media.

But they have not extended this amazing usage potential to actually fluidly allow fans to connect and interact with your music beyond the Soundcloud player.

This isn't so bad with something like Spotify, because Spotify is monetized. That's the trade off - it's a closed app but you at least get paid whenever someone accesses your music. But with Soundcloud, you get 0.

Many artists seem to use Soundcloud for a lot of their sharing. Their band websites use embedded Soundcloud players (or players linked through the Soundcloud API). And they share Soundcloud on social media - it embeds right into Twitter posts.

But realistically - if Spotify were to open up their player to make it more versatile and accessible outside of Spotify, Soundcloud would be in really big trouble. And because I think that day is coming (with Spotify, or some other streaming service that is easily sharable and embeddable, but also monetized) using Soundcloud as primary platform for distributing music kind of scares me.

That's my take anyway: Soundcloud is very powerful, specifically as a platform for sharing music, and is has always had the potential to extend its features into territory currently covered by other platforms, but if they don't figure the finanical side out (both from their business side, and from artists / labels being able to monetize traffic) they got big problems and I wouldn't rely on it to be around forever.

/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers Thread